The legacy monkeyrunner
tool provides an API for writing programs that control an
Android device or emulator from outside of Android code.
The monkeyrunner
tool is primarily designed to test apps and devices
at the functional/framework level and for running unit test suites, but you can use
it for other purposes. With monkeyrunner
, you can write a Python program
that installs an Android app or test package, runs it, sends keystrokes to it,
takes screenshots of its user interface, and stores screenshots on the workstation.
Caution: The monkeyrunner
API is unmaintained. We recommend using the
App Crawler tool or
UI Automator
testing framework instead.
The monkeyrunner
tool isn't related to the
UI/Application Exerciser Monkey,
also known as the monkey
tool. The monkey
tool runs in an
adb
shell directly on the
device or emulator and generates pseudo-random streams of user and system events. In comparison,
the monkeyrunner
tool controls devices and emulators from a workstation by sending
specific commands and events from an API.
The monkeyrunner
tool provides these features for Android testing:
-
Multiple device control: The
monkeyrunner
API can apply one or more test suites across multiple devices or emulators. You can physically attach all the devices or start up all the emulators (or both) at once, connect to each one in turn programmatically, and then run one or more tests. You can also start up an emulator configuration programmatically, run one or more tests, and then shut down the emulator. -
Functional testing:
monkeyrunner
can run an automated start-to-finish test of an Android app. You provide input values with keystrokes or touch events and view the results as screenshots. -
Regression testing:
monkeyrunner
can test app stability by running an app and comparing its output screenshots to a set of screenshots that are known to be correct. -
Extensible automation: Since
monkeyrunner
is an API toolkit, you can develop a system of Python-based modules and programs for controlling Android devices. Besides using themonkeyrunner
API itself, you can use the standard Pythonos
andsubprocess
modules to call Android tools, such as Android Debug Bridge.You can also add your own classes to the
monkeyrunner
API. This is described in more detail in the Extend monkeyrunner with plugins section.
The monkeyrunner
tool uses
Jython, an implementation of Python that uses the Java programming language. Jython lets
the monkeyrunner
API interact easily with the Android framework. With Jython, you
can use Python syntax to access the constants, classes, and methods of the API.
A simple monkeyrunner program
Here is a simple monkeyrunner
program that connects to a device, creating a
MonkeyDevice
object. Using the MonkeyDevice
object, the program installs an Android application
package, runs one of its activities, and sends key events to the activity.
The program then takes a screenshot of the result, creating a
MonkeyImage
object.
From this object, the program writes out a PNG file containing the screenshot.
# Imports the monkeyrunner modules used by this program. from com.android.monkeyrunner import MonkeyRunner, MonkeyDevice # Connects to the current device, returning a MonkeyDevice object. device = MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection() # Installs the Android package. Notice that this method returns a boolean, so you can test # whether the installation worked. device.installPackage('myproject/bin/MyApplication.apk') # Sets a variable with the package's internal name. package = 'com.example.android.myapplication' # Sets a variable with the name of an Activity in the package. activity = 'com.example.android.myapplication.MainActivity' # Sets the name of the component to start. runComponent = package + '/' + activity # Runs the component. device.startActivity(component=runComponent) # Presses the Menu button. device.press('KEYCODE_MENU', MonkeyDevice.DOWN_AND_UP) # Takes a screenshot. result = device.takeSnapshot() # Writes the screenshot to a file. result.writeToFile('myproject/shot1.png','png')
The monkeyrunner API
The monkeyrunner
API is contained in three modules in the
com.android.monkeyrunner
package:
-
MonkeyRunner
: A class of utility methods formonkeyrunner
programs. This class provides a method for connectingmonkeyrunner
to a device or emulator. It also provides methods for creating UIs for amonkeyrunner
program and for displaying the built-in help. -
MonkeyDevice
: Represents a device or emulator. This class provides methods for installing and uninstalling packages, starting an Activity, and sending keyboard or touch events to an app. You also use this class to run test packages. -
MonkeyImage
: Represents a screen capture image. This class provides methods for capturing screens, converting bitmap images to various formats, comparing twoMonkeyImage
objects, and writing an image to a file.
In a Python program, you access each class as a Python module. The monkeyrunner
tool does not import these modules automatically. To import a module, use the
Python from
statement:
from com.android.monkeyrunner import <module>
Where <module>
is the class name you want to import. You can import more
than one module in the same from
statement by separating the module names with
commas.
Run monkeyrunner
You can run monkeyrunner
programs either from a file or by entering
monkeyrunner
statements in
an interactive session. You do both by invoking the monkeyrunner
command,
which is found in the tools/
subdirectory of your SDK directory.
If you provide a filename as an argument, the monkeyrunner
command
runs the file's contents as a Python program; otherwise, it starts an interactive session.
The following is the syntax of the monkeyrunner
command:
monkeyrunner -plugin <plugin_jar> <program_filename> <program_options>
Table 1 explains the monkeyrunner
flags and arguments.
Argument | Description |
---|---|
-plugin <plugin_jar>
|
(Optional) Specifies a JAR file containing a plugin for
monkeyrunner .
To learn more about monkeyrunner plugins, see the
Extend monkeyrunner with plugins section.
To specify more than one file, include the argument multiple times.
|
<program_filename>
|
If you provide this argument, the monkeyrunner command runs the contents
of the file as a Python program. Otherwise, the command starts an
interactive session.
|
<program_options>
|
(Optional) Flags and arguments for the program in <program_file> |
monkeyrunner built-in help
You can generate an API reference for monkeyrunner
by running:
monkeyrunner help.py <format> <outfile>
The arguments are:
-
<format>
is eithertext
for plain text output orhtml
for HTML output. -
<outfile>
is a path-qualified name for the output file.
Extend monkeyrunner with plugins
You can extend the monkeyrunner
API with classes you write in Java
and build into one or more JAR files. You can use this feature to extend
the monkeyrunner
API with your own classes or to extend the existing classes. You
can also use this feature to initialize the monkeyrunner
environment.
To provide a plugin to monkeyrunner
, invoke the monkeyrunner
command
with the -plugin <plugin_jar>
argument described in
table 1.
In your plugin code, you can import and extend the main monkeyrunner
classes
MonkeyDevice
, MonkeyImage
, and MonkeyRunner
in
com.android.monkeyrunner
(see the section about the monkeyrunner
API).
Note that plugins don't give you access to the Android SDK. You can't import packages
such as com.android.app
. This is because monkeyrunner
interacts with
the device or emulator below the level of the framework APIs.
The plugin startup class
The JAR file for a plugin can specify a class that is instantiated before
script processing starts. To specify this class, add the key
MonkeyRunnerStartupRunner
to the JAR file's
manifest. For the value, use the name of the class to run at startup. The following
snippet shows how to do this within an ant
build script:
<jar jarfile="myplugin" basedir="${build.dir}"> <manifest> <attribute name="MonkeyRunnerStartupRunner" value="com.myapp.myplugin"/> </manifest> </jar>
To get access to the monkeyrunner
tool's runtime environment, the startup class can implement
com.google.common.base.Predicate<PythonInterpreter>
. For example, this
class sets up some variables in the default namespace:
Kotlin
package com.android.example import com.google.common.base.Predicate import org.python.util.PythonInterpreter class Main: Predicate<PythonInterpreter> { override fun apply(anInterpreter: PythonInterpreter): Boolean { /* * Examples of creating and initializing variables in the monkeyrunner environment's * namespace. During execution, the monkeyrunner program can refer to the variables * "newtest" and "use_emulator" * */ anInterpreter.set("newtest", "enabled") anInterpreter.set("use_emulator", 1) return true } }
Java
package com.android.example; import com.google.common.base.Predicate; import org.python.util.PythonInterpreter; public class Main implements Predicate<PythonInterpreter> { @Override public boolean apply(PythonInterpreter anInterpreter) { /* * Examples of creating and initializing variables in the monkeyrunner environment's * namespace. During execution, the monkeyrunner program can refer to the variables "newtest" * and "use_emulator" * */ anInterpreter.set("newtest", "enabled"); anInterpreter.set("use_emulator", 1); return true; } }